semen after the hostiles. Meantime the infantry
companies, at the scattered posts and camps, were left to "hold the
fort," to protect the women, children, and property, and Neil Blakely,
a sore-hearted man because forbidden by the surgeon to attempt to go,
was chafing, fuming, and retarding his recovery at his lonely
quarters. The men whom he most liked were gone, and the few among the
women who might have been his friends seemed now to stand afar off.
Something, he knew not what, had turned garrison sentiment against
him.

For a day or two, so absorbed was he in his chagrin over Graham's
verdict and the general's telegraphic orders in the case, Mr. Blakely
never knew or noticed that anything else was amiss. Then, too, there
had been no opportunity of meeting garrison folk except the few
officers who dropped in to inquire civilly how he was progressing. The
bandages were off, but the plaster still disfigured one side of his
face and neck. He could not go forth and seek society. There was
really only one girl at the post whose society he cared to seek. He
had his books and his bugs, and that, said Mrs. Bridger, was "all he
demanded and more than he deserved." To think that the very room so
recently sacred to the son and heir should be transformed into what
that irate little woman called a "beetle shop"! It was one of Mr.
Blakely's unpardonable sins in the eyes of the sex that he found so
much to interest him in a pursuit that neither interested nor included
them. A man with brains and a bank account had no right to live alone,
said Mrs. Sanders, she having a daughter of marriageable age, if only
moderately prepossessing. All this had the women to complain of in him
before the cataclysm that, for the time at least, had played havoc
with his good looks. All this he knew and bore with philosophic and
whimsical stoicism. But all this and more could not account for the
phenomenon of averted eyes and constrained, if not freezing, manner
when, in the dusk of the late autumn evening, issuing suddenly from
his quarters, he came face to face with a party of four young women
under escort of the post adjutant--Mrs. Bridger and Mrs. Truman
foremost of the four and first to receive his courteous, yet half
embarrassed, greeting. They had to stop for half a second, as they
later said, because really he confronted them, all unsuspected. But
the other two, Kate Sanders and Mina Westervelt, with bowed heads and
without a word, scurried by